The lights go out in Europe

Several tragedies of extermination rest on library shelves, accessible to anyone who wants to know. Few do. Reading has become a chore in the age of slogans and short TikTok videos.

And there also lie, even more ignored, the stories intertwined with anti-Semitism, the moral disease that never heals and only changes its disguise. Like a chameleon that adapts to its environment, adapts its color and shape, but always retains the same essence: hatred of Jews.

Centuries of accusations have been made: the Jew is a murderer, a conspirator, a corruptor, a capitalist, a miser, a usurer, and a revolutionary all at once. The creativity in adjectives is immense, but the substance is lacking.

The latest incarnation of this contradiction crystallized with the birth of Israel. The Jew, once imagined as a submissive and guilty figure, walking down the street with a hunched back and fearful gaze, has become a fighter, straightening his spine, standing upright, and refusing to allow others' wills to be imposed upon him. This is unforgivable.

And this is the essence of the obsessive hostility toward Israel, which permeates the media, schools, the streets, and politics. It unites, on the same platform of hate, Islamic fundamentalists from the Muslim Brotherhood, left-wing extremists like Mariana Mortágua, Tiago Ávila, and Pedro Sanchez, neo-Nazis like Mário Machado, "social center" sycophants like Porto's CDS party member Raul Almeida, "moderates" like Paulo Rangel, and useful idiots of various etiologies, from Sofia Aparício to the Russophile General Agostinho Costa, and the herds and flocks of "Palestinianists" churned out in droves in our schools.

It's worth noting that criticizing a government is not anti-Semitism. Many Israelis detest Netanyahu or the coalitions that support him as prime minister. Others admire him. Just like in other countries around the world that have a democratic system.

Until October 7, 2023, there were street protests against his government, against corruption, against specific policies. Like here. Like in Europe. All of this is legitimate and part of the democratic game. But it's one thing to criticize a democratic government. It's another to demonize an entire state, as if its mere existence were the root of all the planet's ills. As if it were the "Jew" of nations.

Just turn on the television. We hear more and more people spouting hatred, shamelessly, as if the dissolution of Israel and the expulsion or massacre of Israeli Jews and Arabs were the magic solution to all the world's suffering. Proponents of the "Final Solution" are once again emerging from the mass grave of history where we thought they were buried.

The same people who remain silent in the face of dozens and dozens of regimes that daily crush human rights, such as Qatar or China, and yet sign million-dollar contracts with European countries without street protests, boycotts, flags, or fashionable scarves.

That 's where the professional "humanitarian" activists come in. They scream against Israel with foam at the mouth, but they don't care about children dying in the Congo to extract minerals that power their cell phones, where they share their hatred of Israel. They don't feel sick watching Al Jazeera's abject propaganda or heating their homes with Qatari gas. What harm can come from an emirate that funds Hamas and the "causes" that undermine the West, and where stoning women is entertainment and modern slavery employs thousands?

And so the drama continues: it doesn't matter that in Iran homosexuals are hanged from public cranes, that in Afghanistan women live locked up like cattle, or that in North Korea hundreds of thousands rot in concentration camps. None of this is exciting enough to fill European squares or form flotillas. These are uncomfortable corpses that don't get likes , selfies, or slogans.

What matters is something else: that there is always a Jew available to serve as a moral punching bag. That's why we don't blink at the repression and misery in Venezuela, or the public executions of Palestinians at the hands of Hamas. It's a selective blindness that only finds its target when the subject involves Jews.

"Love" for the Palestinian people only exists to the extent that it can be used against Israel. How many Arab leaders have grown rich by keeping Palestinians in the limbo of "refugee camps"? How many regimes have used their misery as a smokescreen to conceal their own tyranny? How many thousands of them have been killed in Lebanon and Jordan, without a single flotilla ship even getting off the couch?

Decadent Europe, instead of learning, repeats the same old formula. It gives in, appeases evil, polarizes populations, fuels hatred, all to mask unemployment, corruption, political bankruptcy, and palace games. The Portuguese government recognizes a nonexistent state, simply to secure the votes of Arab countries for a spot on the Security Council. It's the politics of jobs and groceries, and in this bargain, the Jew is only one, to hell with it!

Basically, nothing new. For centuries, Jews have been accused of killing children and drinking their blood. Today, these slanders return to the news, recycled in images of "famine" conveniently manipulated and supplied by a terrorist group that controls Gaza with an iron fist. It doesn't matter that they manipulate statistics, use civilians as shields, shoot those who disobey them, or hide in tunnels while sending women and children to their deaths. Martyrs serve them, and the more, the merrier.

Meanwhile, the October 7th massacres—the rapes, the beheadings, the families burned alive—earned only a few timid and brief Israeli flags in European cities. The hostages are barely mentioned anymore. Western reaction was lukewarm, quickly shifting from timid condemnation to cynical justification: it was horrible, but Israel deserved it. Guterres immediately set the tone: it was bad, but ultimately, the blame doesn't lie with the perpetrators.

The tremendous words came in a torrent, always with the aim of trying to delegitimize the "Jew of the nations." War crimes, disproportionate actions, famine, genocide.

Currently, the trend is to accuse Israel of genocide. It's ignored that genocide requires intent to exterminate, something that completely contradicts the attitude of a state that warns civilians before attacking. That sends them free food to feed them. That provides them with water and electricity. That welcomes them by the thousands to work and receive treatment in proper hospitals.

Truly independent reports, such as that of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, have already rejected such a label. But that hardly matters. The objective is not the truth, but stoning and obscene equivalence: placing Israel on the same level as Nazism, trivializing the Holocaust, and rewriting history.

The paradox is that the true genocidaires are Hamas and its accomplices, who declare urbi et orbi their intention to exterminate the Jews and wipe Israel off the map.

The question, then, is simple: have we learned nothing? The words of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi-allied mufti of Jerusalem, spoken in 1943, that " It is necessary to cleanse the world of the Jewish weed, which contaminates all the lands of Islam," or Joseph Goebbels's 1935 speech in Nuremberg, that " The Jew is the weed of humanity. Wherever he flourishes, the soil dies," can today be heard effortlessly on the streets of London, Paris, Madrid, or Lisbon.

The only difference is that it's no longer anti-Semitism. Now it wears the immaculate robe of "anti-Zionism" or "love for the Palestinian cause." And the most sinister thing is that those who shout it don't even recognize the hatred they carry. On the contrary, they fervently believe themselves to be lovers of justice, peace, and love.

And this is the moral horror of an age when thousands can be raped, burned, or kidnapped and, days later, no longer count. Jewish blood clots quickly. The world that once swore "Never Again" has in an instant raised its fist and shouted "Again."

A shadow grows over us. The West, which should hold the memory of the Holocaust as a warning, marches gleefully toward its repetition. Convinced, once again, that it is on the right side of history.

And so old Europe returns to its original nightmare: crowds in the streets shouting hateful slogans , complicit elites pretending to see nothing, and the Jews once again chosen as the scapegoat for all the world's evils. The lights of the capitals go out, one by one, while the ignorant masses applaud the darkness and convince themselves it is for justice. That is the horror. Absolute evil, convinced it is for good.